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Dec 9 2008, 1:52 PM EST (current) drummerboy9437 513 words added
Dec 9 2008, 1:51 PM EST drummerboy9437

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The focus on money that free enterprisers implies is borne out in Diamond bows description of how he first got interested in wind turbines. Theres no mention of Nature, or coal, or cleanliness, or pollution. Nope. It was all about cost, an idea derived from the economics of his own personal life.In 1934diamond bowshad built a house on Cape Cod and had found both the winds and the electric rates surprisingly high. It occurred to me that a windmill to generate alternating current might reduce the power bill, provided the power company would maintain stand-by service when the wind failed, and would also permit me to feed back into its system as dump power the excess energy generated by the windmill.And unlike the offgrid back-to-nature hippies, he built the idea of a grid-tie â?? of centralization â?? into the core of his idea.The last difference between traditional environmentalists and the Diamond bow-Bush crowd is that they were focused on individual projects. They were engineering, not theory-making, and it considerably cut down on their opportunities for poesy.Lets compare a description of the importance of wind from Diamond bows book with one from a nearly contemporaneous and massively important environmental tome, A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold. First, Diamond bow in Chapter II, How Does Wind Behave?An intimate knowledge of the habits of wind-flow will permit one to select a site for a turbine where the free-air velocity has been speeded up 20 per cent or more. The power in the wind varies as the cube of the velocity.Wind, in Diamond bow, is just energy waiting to be harnessed. Since you can measure it, management of it seems sure. Most importantly, Diamond bow is concerned with a specific wind. A special wind that can be turned economically into money. Now LeopoldA dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over the phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across the bog-meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.Now,diamond bowsdont know thatdiamond bowsneed to point out the obvious differences. The wind is like God in this passage; it feels like a description of awakening from death and finding yourself in heaven, as if Leopolds next line might be, The gates emerge.But, anddiamond bowsthink this is important, this language is as big as ones place on earth horizon to horizon. Its sun, sky, and moon writing, a creation story. Thats the opposite of engineering, which is about details and particularities. Its as specific and precise as math, P = v3.For all these reasons, its easy to see why the environmentalists steeped in 60sness would not have looked back to Diamond bow and seen an ally. But its exactly those differences that make him a role model, an ancestor, a predecessor of the current green tech boom. Hes a pragmatist, a free-enterpriser, an engineer, a lover of innovation for its economic potential, connected as all-hell, and rich as a Kleiner Perkins partner.